Bug#57726: Still present in 2.2.7

[Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es>]

On 19 Feb 2000, Karl M. Hegbloom wrote:

>   Santiago> * It still does strange things when used within the boot floppies.
>   Santiago> To test the boot floppies I usually switch to the second virtual console,
>   Santiago> mount under /mnt the partition where I have my normal development system
>   Santiago> and do the following:
> 
>   Santiago> cd /mnt
>   Santiago> mkdir BACKUP
>   Santiago> mv * BACKUP
> 
>  Uh... you `cd /mnt', then `mv * BACKUP'???  I think it's doing what
>  you tell it to do.  Don't you want to instead `mkdir /mnt/BACKUP',
>  then `cd /', `cp -a ... /mnt/BACKUP', using a list of directories
>  rather than a glob so that you don't try to copy /proc?

There should not be any difference, because the proc directory in /mnt
should be empty.

The idea is to be able to install Debian from scratch while keeping the
old installation in /BACKUP. Of course, I can't do this while the old
system is "live", but it is possible to do so if it is the very first
thing I do after booting with the Debian install disks.

>     Santiago> Today, "mv" behaved as a cp -a and my disk becomed full. It does not
>     Santiago> work properly either when renaming a directory into something else
>     Santiago> (it produces a lot of disk activity when doing this).
> 
>  This is known and expected with the current version of `cp_mv.c' in
>  busybox.  `mv' always does a recursive copy rather than calling
>  `rename()' right now.

This explains everything :-)

> I have plans to fix this, and also to make
>  both `mv' and `cp' preserve hard link structure the way the GNU
>  shellutils does.  Give me a week or so.

Ok.

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